ETH Dev to Set Dencun Hard Fork Date

Ethereum developers revealed that they plan to set a mainnet launch for the Dencun upgrade, which will introduce several EIPS, including proto-dank sharing, expected to drive down transaction costs on layer-2s by Thursday.

Overview

On February 1 2024, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko‘s post to Reddit revealed that the recent testing of the upgrade “went very well” and emphasised crucial details of the All Developer Execution Call (ACDE) 180 call. On January 30 2024, ETH developers drew attention to the Sepolia fork’s recent success and the upcoming Holesky testnet upgrade on February 8, 2024.

A blog post from the Ethereum Foundation outlined that the Dencun upgrade incorporated several significant adjustments to Ethereum‘s consensus and execution layers. Beiko wrote on X, “If running a node on either network, now’s the time to update it.” According to the report, the upgrade will trail the Shapella upgrade, which occurred last year and was executed on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12 2023.

Views on Upgrade

Ethereum Ecosystem Lead at Blockdaemon, Freddy Zwanzger, suggested that the upgrade could bring in staking from new institutional investors on ETH and more interest in Ethereum staking opportunities from professional investors. Zwanzger, whose company has many institutional clients, highlighted that “theres probably going to be a queue for the first couple of weeks. So they might be better off waiting until that reaches normal levels.” Co-founder and President at GSR, Rich Rosenblum, mentioned that the upgrade should mitigate risks for investors as lower vitality plus a yield makes for a familiar and less risky asset to hold long-term.

Rosenblum said, “Once the PoS network is fully operational, more institutions will feel comfortable holding ETH, especially once the staking yield becomes more accessible.” The protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, Beiko, said, “Assuming everything looks good by then, we‘ll pick a mainnet fork time on next week’s ACDC.” The next ACDC call is scheduled for next week. Vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, Christine Kim, suggested that the chance of Dencun mainnet activation will be at 80% by the end of March; however, Dencun could go live by the end of February with 40% odds. Kim posted her views and quick notes from the Ethereum dev call on X.

Quick notes from today's Eth dev call, ACDE #180:

– Devs are planning to set a mainnet date for Dencun activation *next Thurs on ACDC #127*.

(Devs could feasibly schedule out mainnet activation 3 weeks from the meeting, which would put Dencun activation at end of Feb, instead…

— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) February 1, 2024

Background

On January 17 2024, Dencun went live on the Goerli testnet but was initially unable to be finalised for approximately four hours. Ethereum developer Parithosh Jayanthi revealed that a bug delayed the networks launch, but once the patch was fixed, validators came back online, and the chain started finalising again. Developers claim that once Dencun is implemented on the mainnet, the upgrade will significantly lower the fees of transactions on Ethereum layer 2s such as Base, zkEVM, Polygon, Optimism and others. This upgrade will limit self-destruct operations and allow new bridge and staking pool features.

The upgrade introduced several EIPs, which enabled protocol-dank sharding that plans to reduce the cost of rollups, which typically batch transactions and data off-chain and submit computational proof to the Ethereum blockchain. Proto-dank sharding makes data availability cheaper by introducing a new compartmentalised container for data called blobs. In January 2024, the announcement mentioned that if yesterday‘s upgrade goes well, the final test for Dencun will take place on Holesky on February 7 2024, at 11:34 UTC. Then, the developers will link a date for Dencun to hit Ethereum’s mainnet, scheduled for the end of February and early March 2024.

Recent data from market intelligence firm Santiment revealed that Ethereums price is up and is fueled by increasing network activity at approximately 30% more than it was 90 days ago. This data suggests that more users are transacting on the network, deploying smart contracts and building decentralised applications.